WATCH: The Wii U’s Nifty New Speed Trick

Will wonders never cease? Nintendo's Wii U, presently the slowest video game console when it comes to opening and closing apps -- possibly in the history of video game consoles -- was apparently just doused in heavy water vapors.

Will wonders never cease? Nintendo’s Wii U, presently the slowest video game console when it comes to opening and closing apps — possibly in the history of video game consoles — was apparently just doused in heavy water vapors.

No really, check out the video above. You know how the Wii U can’t turn on a dime or a quarter or a semi-sized hubcap? Nintendo’s apparently fixed that, and they’re offering documentary proof.

From the main menu, tapping “System Settings” took 14 seconds to load. Exiting back to the Wii U Menu took another 20 seconds. Again, from the main menu, tapping the Netflix icon took 33 seconds to load (for this, I blame Netflix, since it’s equally slow to load on my Xbox 360, PS3 and Apple TV), but exiting back to the Wii U Menu took an unbelievable 30 seconds to load. I tested this repeatedly with everything else and consistently clocked 20-30 seconds whenever reloading the Wii U Menu.

You see the problem. Launch and exit a dozen apps in an hour and you’ll spend roughly as many minutes staring at load screens. The Wii U’s icon-driven, multi-screen menu system may look like iOS, but it’s nothing like it performance-wise.

So basically if you’re a Wii U user, you’ve been living with a dog-slow system from a navigational perspective for months. Nintendo promised a while back that it would remedy this in a major April update. The video above illustrates what we can probably expect when that update hits.

Judging from the video, the speedup delivers: a wait-time drop from 21.5 seconds to just 8.3 (that’s according to my iPhone’s stopwatch, clicking “start” as soon as the person in the video tapped “Wii U Menu” and “stop” the second the menu icons finally appeared). While eight seconds is still a leap from something like iOS’s ability to instantaneously back out of an app, I’ll take it. I’d still like to know, however, why it takes any time at all. When you kill an Xbox 360 or PS3 app, you’re back to the menu almost instantly. Why can’t we expect the same of the Wii U? Is that Miiverse view with all the little weeble-wobble-y characters milling about really that big a resource hog?

When can you get the update? April, which may thus turn out not to be the cruelest month after all.